Smarter Technology Spend with AI-Driven Financial Intelligence

Technology leaders sit at the intersection of every transformation confronting businesses: cloud migration, digital transformation, and of course, AI adoption. To navigate these monumental (and monumentally expensive) shifts while optimizing for business value, technology leaders are increasingly looking to AI. But AI alone cannot guide Technology Business Management (TBM); it requires trusted financial, operational, and organizational data, grounded in business context. Integrating AI into TBM requires access to financial, operational, and organizational data, as well as critical context. Unfortunately, this data is typically siloed between different tools, departments, and employees, hindering informed decision-making. To adopt and scale AI that builds trust and proves business value, technology leaders need financial intelligence, a data and business value framework that unifies cost, performance, and business outcomes.

The Challenge: Extracting Value from Technology Spend and Consumption Data

The fundamental challenge facing any team is data: accessing it, preparing it, and analyzing it. For TBM teams, this challenge is magnified by the fact that they need highly sensitive data that’s almost always siloed across systems like ERP, CMDB, and cloud platforms. This data is also typically stored in inconsistent formats, making it nearly impossible for technology leaders to access the complete data necessary for informed investments.

For both humans and AI, trying to make sense of this data is like trying to read a book in multiple languages with the pages randomized…while new chapters are still being added on a regular basis. Not only is existing data buried in different systems, but new data is constantly being generated, creating an ever-growing mountain of critical information. But tech investment decisions rarely rely on a single data source, requiring cross-platform visibility. For example:

• Hybrid IT decisions, such as optimizing workloads across on-prem and multi-cloud, demand integrated insights.
• Application rationalization means reconciling financial and technical costs.
• Cloud migration, specifically understanding whether a move makes sense, requires understanding numerous dependencies.

Financial intelligence ensures that AI and technology leaders have the complete data they need to make smart investment decisions, fast. It provides the framework for contextualizing data, generating accurate insights, and automating processes with AI in ways that are reliable and scalable.

The Solution: Apptio Financial Intelligence – Powered by AI

Smarter tech investment decisions start with a shared decision fabric across the enterprise that enables CIOs, CFOs, and business leaders to align on common data, financial context, and business value. It starts with Apptio’s Financial Intelligence Layer, a unified data and context layer grounded in TBM best practices. This gives organizations the ability to correlate cost, performance, and business value across technology investments.

Apptio’s Financial Intelligence Layer transforms fragmented financial and operational data into structured, enriched datasets that are ready for analysis. It enables TBM teams to tap into their organization’s most valuable resource – critical operational, financial, and organizational data – and uncover strategic insights that support more resilient and effective practices across TBM disciplines like ITFM, FinOps, and SPM.

By solving the accessibility, context, and analysis challenges that have frustrated TBM teams for years, Apptio’s Financial Intelligence Layer creates a virtuous cycle: AI surfaces insights faster, technology leaders make decisions more proactively, and technology investments provide more business value.

AI Built by Apptio, for Apptio – And Your TBM Practice

Generic AI tools struggle with TBM workflows for two significant reasons: the level of tailoring needed for specific roles and workflows, and the acute need for security and transparency when handling financial data. Apptio, backed by over 17 years of experience in TBM as well as IBM Research, delivers AI capabilities that work for TBM teams while protecting data.

• Explainable, contextual insights with AI capabilities in Apptio are purpose-built for TBM disciplines like ITFM, FinOps, and Strategic Portfolio Management with open, performant, and trusted enterprise-grade models.
• Faster time-to-value through ready-to-use cost modeling frameworks and integrations with systems of record (ERP, CMDB, cloud platforms).
• Embedded intelligence with AI insights that are integrated into TBM workflows. No context-switching or tool fatigue.
• Enterprise-grade governance and security that’s trusted by leading organizations across finance, healthcare, and government.

By unifying and contextualizing essential data in a trusted TBM platform, financial intelligence creates a virtuous cycle of deeper insights and faster decisions powered by AI. Rather than relying on disconnected or ad-hoc tools, each member of the team gets fast, relevant insights and tailored guidance embedded directly into their Apptio workflows.

The AI for TBM Difference

Apptio harnesses AI to reduce manual effort where it matters most to TBM teams, creating a flywheel that continuously improves business outcomes for every stakeholder:

• Bring context to data: Break data silos with automated data prep and mapping to common TBM frameworks like FOCUS and ATUM.
• Uncover insights: Accelerate decision-making with AI-powered data analysis that reduces the effort needed to decipher patterns from larger volumes of data.
• Action autonomously: Reduce the cognitive load on TBM teams by proactively surfacing insights, triggering multi-step workflows, and delivering personalized insights without manual effort.

Together, these capabilities ensure that AI-powered Apptio actually works for TBM teams at scale. These features, which can be found across Apptio products for FinOps, ITFM, SPM, and more, include:

• AI Assistant: Conversational Insights: Contextualizes data by enabling team members to query Apptio cost models in natural language. In other words, quickly explore financial, operational, and organizational data without the need for deep TBM expertise, sifting through reports, or leaving the Apptio environment.
• AI Lens for FinOps: Uncovers insights with AI-powered analyses on report data. Users can easily identify top cost and usage drivers across data sources and dimensions, plus connect notable cost and usage dynamics with optimization recommendations from Cloudability – so teams can spend less time on labor-intensive manual analysis and more time optimizing cloud spend.
• Intelligent Forecasting: Autonomously takes action to predict future spend with IBM time-series modeling. Optimize spend and navigate uncertainty with fine-tuned insights into seasonality, business, cycles, and tech adoption curves, plus scenario planning and what-if analysis. Teams get even more confidence in their planning with anomaly detection, confidence scores, and model transparency.

Grounded in Apptio’s mission to advance TBM practices that reduce waste and increase business value, AI-powered Apptio leads the next generation of AI tools: trusted, impactful, and designed to help people perform better and faster. Explore new capabilities and be the first to discover new AI features by visiting the Apptio Innovation Hub.

Smarter Decisions, Faster Actions, Greater Value

While the hype cycle is busy chasing the next big thing, technology leaders are connecting the dots between innovation, tech investments, and ROI. AI designed for TBM success embedded in Apptio enables AI to become a proactive decision partner and a competitive advantage, not just a reporting tool. Backed by nearly two decades of TBM innovation and IBM Research, Apptio helps teams successfully adopt AI to unlock the full value of technology investments, turning every dollar spent into measurable business value.